In our everyday lives we are
surrounded by petroleum products, from petrol fuel to polyesters for producing of the materials for cloth and polymer products. Catalysts are developed to
reduce the activation energy required for chemical reactions and speed up the reactions, while at the same time opening up a variety of new routes. Thus,
catalysts play a vital role in the production of products from petroleum.
Functional catalysts can also help to reduce the environmental impact of
production processes. Our aim is to develop new and more powerful catalysts
for promoting material conversion processes for the purpose of efficient energy
production and environmental harm minimization.

At the moment our research is also focused
on creating solid acid-base catalysts for converting biomass resources. For instance,
environmentally friendly hydrocarbon resources (cellulose) such as rice straw and wood
scrap are readily available and easily recycled, and could play a major role in
the production of renewable chemicals and alternative fuels as oil reserves
become exhausted. To this end, we are continually designing, preparing, testing and analyzing new catalysts in a bid to find the optimum solution for each process. And in the future, we will see further
advances in technology for conversion of non-petroleum base materials used to
make liquid fuels and chemicals, which could pave the way for the so-called
hydrogen-based society. If we can develop processes for making hydrogen from a
variety of renewable resources, this would make a very significant contribution
to solving the problem of global warming. Thus, one of our key challenges is
the development of viable hydrogen production technology.

In addition to the research in catalysis, we also focus on the development of material for capturing heavy metal from wastewater and drinking water. Wastewater or drinking water containing heavy metal ions is considered as the serious environmental problem in human society.
Adsorption as the widely used method plays an important role in water treatment, which is based on the physical
interaction between metal ions and sorbents. With the development of porous nanomaterials are used as the
sorbents in water treatment; we have proved that porous nanomaterials are one of the effective sorbents for the
capturing heavy metal ions from wastewater or drinking water due to their unique structure properties. Besides, the adsorption
isotherm model and adsorption kinetics are studied to understand the adsorption procedure.

MAIN RESEARCH THEMES

Design of solid catalysts for converting resources

Elucidating the reaction mechanisms over solid catalysts

Developing catalysts for making hydrogen and synthesis gases
from natural gas and biomass